During a press conference on Monday afternoon, President Trump was asked why he has yet to comment on the deaths of four U.S. service members killed in an ISIS ambush in Niger ten days ago. Trump said he’d written condolence letters to their families, and planned to call them too:

I’ve written them personal letters. They’ve been sent, or they’re going out tonight, but they were written during the weekend. I will, at some point during the period of time, call the parents and the families — because I have done that, traditionally. I felt very, very badly about that. I always feel badly. It’s the toughest — the toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens, soldiers are killed. It’s a very difficult thing. Now, it gets to a point where, you know, you make four or five of them in one day — it’s a very, very tough day. For me, that’s by far the toughest.

That would have been an acceptable answer (though that doesn’t explain why he hasn’t made any public comments about the incident). However, since the president cannot accept blame and claims he’s the best at everything, he went on to accuse his predecessors of failing to call the families of fallen troops:

So, the traditional way — if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it. They have made the ultimate sacrifice.

So, generally, I would say that I like to call. I’m going to be calling them. I want a little time to pass. I’m going to be calling them. I have — as you know, since I’ve been president, I have.

But in addition, I actually wrote letters individually to the soldiers we’re talking about, and they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow.

Yes.

Trump on soldiers killed in Niger: "President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls ... I call when it's appropriate." pic.twitter.com/sgj5iEuDhz

This is one of Trump’s more outrageous accusations, and he actually walked it back a bit later in the press conference. After a reporter called him out on his false claim that previous presidents didn’t reach out to fallen service members’ families, Trump suggested that he meant he’s going above and beyond by reaching out with a letter and a phone call:

Q: Earlier, you said that President Obama never called the families of fallen soldiers. How can you make that claim?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know if he did. No, no, no, I was told that he didn’t often. And a lot of Presidents don’t; they write letters. I do –

Q: (Inaudible.)

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, Peter. I do a combination of both. Sometimes — it’s a very difficult thing to do, but I do a combination of both. President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals. Other Presidents did not call. They’d write letters. And some Presidents didn’t do anything. But I like the combination of – I like, when I can, the combination of a call and also a letter.

Trump’s insinuation that previous presidents didn’t do enough to reach out to troops’ families was quickly refuted by journalists, former aides, and people who lost their loved ones:

that's a fucking lie. to say president obama (or past presidents) didn't call the family members of soldiers KIA - he's a deranged animal.

Later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that Trump wasn’t criticizing his predecessors at all, he was merely stating facts: “Sometimes they call, sometimes they send a letter, other times they have the opportunity to meet family members in person.”

But it’s clear that President Trump wasn’t making a technical note based on his detailed analysis of how his predecessors reached out to grieving military families. As with many of Trump’s dubious facts, it appears his source is something he heard once in the right-wing media.

President Obama’s ostensible disrespect for the military was, of course, a popular theme in the conservative press, and it seems Trump might have been referencing some of these reports. While the Washington Timesreported in 2009 that Obama wrote out personalized letters to fallen troops’ families and signed them “Barack,” what drew more attention was a claim deep in a 2010 story from The News Tribune about a father’s dissatisfaction with how politicians responded to his son’s death in Afghanistan. The father said he asked the White House to call his ex-wife and “was told that Obama did not regularly make phone calls to the families of fallen soldiers.”

Trump’s note that he “actually wrote letters individually” was likely a reference to a 2012 post from the Gateway Pundit that claimed President Obama sent grieving military families “form letters — signed by an electric pen.” The White House said Obama “personally signs every letter to the families of fallen service members in Iraq and Afghanistan,” but did not dispute that they were form letters. (In 2003 Newsweek reported that the sympathy letters sent out by President George W. Bush were form letters as well.)

Six days after the 2015 shootings at two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mother of one of the five servicemen killed in the attack appeared on Hannity and said she’d yet to receive a call from Obama. There was also uproar from the right about the White House waiting five days to order flags at half-staff. Breitbart illustrated its report, titled “Obama Refuses to Call Mother of Murdered Marine; White House Won’t Lower Flag,” with the White House lit up to celebrate the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Trump appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on the night Sean Hannity’s interview aired, and he tweeted several times about the points the host raised, so it seems likely he saw the episode.

It’s true that, in the past, some military families have been dissatisfied with the president’s response to the death of their loved one. It is completely false, however, to suggest that it’s “traditional” for the president to not even call the families of fallen service members. There is ample evidence that President Obama, President George W. Bush, and previous presidents made a habit of calling, writing, and meeting with military families who lost loved ones.

It seems mostly likely that Trump was basing his assertion on reports about Obama amplified in conservative media. But to make matters worse, rather than just admitting that he didn’t have all the facts, Trump pinned his inaccurate comments on top members of the military. “That’s what I was told,” he said. “All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals.”

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THE FEED

11/21/2018

In Thanksgiving Eve news dump, Facebook admits to asking conservative oppo group to go after George Soros

Did we ask them to do work on George Soros?

Yes. In January 2018, investor and philanthropist George Soros attacked Facebook in a speech at Davos, calling us a “menace to society.” We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation. Definers researched this using public information.

Later, when the “Freedom from Facebook” campaign emerged as a so-called grassroots coalition, the team asked Definers to help understand the groups behind them. They learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members. They prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement.

Unsurprisingly, Trump responded to criticism from Chief Justice John Roberts on Twitter

Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have “Obama judges,” and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an “independent judiciary,” but if it is why……

…..are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security - these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!

It’s not really about whether or not the party wants Nancy Pelosi, the 78-year-old Democrat from San Francisco. It’s about whether they want a master of the House or someone they can bring to their districts to campaign for them.

U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said delays by the government in responding to court orders and producing documents in response to a class action lawsuit had “shattered” the families of detained Iraqis facing deportation.

“From the earliest stages of this case,” he wrote, “the Government made demonstrably false statements to the Court designed to delay the proceedings.”

you wrote that in 2018, the steady decline of split-ticket voting – that is, voting for candidates from different parties for different offices, a practice that used to be fairly common in america – continued apace. can you briefly explain why so many more people vote for one party straight down the ballot than used to?

Ed Kilgore12:15 PM

The single biggest reason is the ideological sorting out of the parties that’s been underway for about a half-century. Used to be liberals and conservatives had candidates they could support in both parties. And there were whole regions (notably the South) where national and state parties were not in alignment.

When I came of age in Georgia, there was a ballot line during presidential years that let you vote straight-party after voting for president, which was designed to make it easy for conservatives to vote for Republican presidential candidates and then back the generally conservative Democratic ticket for everything else.

That’s all gone.

Benjamin Hart12:17 PM

and this really began in earnest around the time that the democratic party aligned itself with civil rights and racial justice, correct?

but it took a long time to get where we are today

Ed Kilgore12:19 PM

Yeah, certainly in the South. The sorting out happened at different paces in different places. But if you look at the ideological composition of, say, both parties in Congress right now, it’s light years away from where it was in the 1970s, when there were quite a few liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. So there’s much less reason to split tickets.

Benjamin Hart12:22 PM

with the republican party having veered far to the right in the last couple of decades, and now democrats drifting lefter than they have been in a while, do you see any sign that this trend will slow down? or will the comparatively miniscule number of ticket-splitters going to fall even farther in two years, with trump again on the ballot?

Ed Kilgore12:24 PM

There will always be some ticket-splitters, if only among voters who are non-ideological or whose world view is unconventional or, well, confused. But yeah, Trump’s the perfect president for a polarized country. Thing is, going after swing voters still makes sense in very close races.

At the Senate and gubernatorial levels, there’s evidence that incumbency can outweigh straight-ticket voting, which explains most of 2018’s anomalies, like Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Governor Charlie Baker in Massachusetts.

Benjamin Hart12:26 PM

yes, though someone like baker has not been in office very long, and he had to get elected in the first place somehow. it does seem that a new england republican can still survive in new england, and there may be other regional quirks like that.

Ed Kilgore12:26 PM

Yeah, most of these outliers seem to be in Appalachia or the northeast.

But they are generally exceptions that prove the rule…the overall trend is pretty clear.

Benjamin Hart12:29 PM

here’s something I wonder: so often we hear about ramped-up polarization as the thing that’s poisoning our politics, our discourse, our society: but, in your view, is this ideological sorting necessarily a bad thing? shouldn’t voters have a pretty clear idea of what the parties they vote stand for? (our colleague eric levitz addressed this topic recently:

Yes, I generally agree. The old system where a handful of bipartisan conservatives in Congress ran everything wasn’t exactly paradise. Sometimes polarization is confused with “gridlock” and “divided government.” We have these two phenomena basically because of the constitutional system governing Senate and presidential elections. If everything was ordered according to national popular votes, Democrats would totally be in charge and we wouldn’t have much “gridlock.” But the electoral college obviously isn’t perfectly representative, and the Senate is worse. And the strange phasing of Senate elections–which this year meant that Democrats could win 22 of 34 races and still lose seats–aggravates the problem.

Ed Kilgore12:34 PM

The Senate filibuster, or what’s left of it (which is actually quite a bit), is another obstacle to accountable party-based government.

Benjamin Hart12:36 PM

so in effect the systemic problems, many of which dated back to the founding of the republic, are bigger hurdles to a functioning country than the fact that “moderates” are an endangered species in both parties

Ed Kilgore12:39 PM

Yes. The need for “bipartisanship” directly flows from systemic dysfunction.

To be clear, though, the conquest of the GOP by a self-conscious, highly ideological conservative movement was a big deal in itself. Democrats may be catching up in internal consistency, but so long as 99% of Republican office-holders call themselves “conservatives” we aren’t going back to the old bipartisan ways, and if we did it would mostly require surrender by Democrats.

We’d be pretty much back to where we were when the so-called “conservative coalition” ruled Congress in the 1940s and 1950s.

Ed Kilgore12:41 PM

In any event, the quick capitulation of both the GOP and the conservative movement to a pol whom half the country abhors pretty much closed the door on lets-get-along politics for the foreseeable future. It’s now a matter of fighting it out until one side or the other has the power to enact an agenda.

Wow. After Trump said he was going to file a complaint about the 9th Circuit Court, Chief Justice John Roberts said: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges…” Per @JoanBiskupicpic.twitter.com/xK2o8GMSI8

The white nationalists mailed their donations in dribs and drabs: Sometimes a $10 check, sometimes as money orders, sometimes in cash — often in U.S. dollars, but also in British pounds and other foreign currencies.

All of it went to support the Daily Stormer, the Internet’s most notorious neo-Nazi website, featuring sections including “Jewish Problem” and “Race War.” Over the last five years, the far-right site operated by Andrew Anglin, 34, raked in at least $100,000 to $125,000 from supporters, according to an estimate contained in court records filed last Friday.

The money went to an office — and later, a P.O. box — in Worthington, Ohio, maintained by Anglin’s father, Greg, a retired therapist, who would collect and deposit the funds. Greg Anglin had helped his son, at the time a far-right blogger, set up the website in 2013 and it soon became one of the Internet’s top destinations for unabashed racists.

Two years before her death, by bullets that shattered her bedroom window Monday night, 13-year-old Sandra Parks wrote about the violence that plagues many Milwaukee neighborhoods.

“We are in a state of chaos,” Sandra wrote as a sixth-grader in an award-winning essay commemorating the life of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost every day. Little children are victims of senseless gun violence,” she wrote. “Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr. King’s dream!”

Sandra, an eighth-grader at Keefe Avenue School, was shot about 8 p.m. Monday in the bedroom of her home in the 2700 block of North 13th Street.

ANOTHER @NancyPelosi critic CAVES: Rep. Brian Higgins, who was one of the 16 who signed that letter vowing to vote against Pelosi on the House floor. Wow. It’s only been two weeks of Pelosi’s whipping campaign! https://t.co/8pMTqWyWjb

At the rate late-counted ballots have broken, #CA21 Rep. David Valadao (R) isn’t just in “jeopardy,” he’s probably the underdog. That means the likeliest House outcome at the moment is a Dem gain of *40 seats.*

Steve Bannon’s political operation to help rightwing populists triumph in next year’s European parliamentary elections is in disarray after he conceded that his campaign efforts could be illegal in most of the countries in which he planned to intervene.

The former chief strategist to Donald Trump has spent months trying to recruit European parties to his Brussels-based group, the Movement, which he promised would operate as kind of a political consultancy for like-minded parties campaigning in the bloc-wide vote in May 2019.

But the Guardian has established that Bannon would be barred or prevented from doing any meaningful work in nine of the 13 countries in which he is seeking to campaign, according to national electoral bodies and relevant ministries. Confronted with the findings, Bannon acknowledged he was taking legal advice on the matter.

A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had a large lump of plastic waste in its stomach, including drinking cups and flip-flops, a park official said Tuesday, causing concern among environmentalists and government officials in one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries.

Rescuers from Wakatobi National Park found the rotting carcass of the 9.5-metre-long sperm whale late Monday near the park in Southeast Sulawesi province after receiving a report from environmentalists that villagers had surrounded the dead whale and were beginning to butcher the remains, park chief Heri Santoso said.

An American is believed to have been killed by an isolated Indian island tribe known to fire at outsiders with bows and arrows, Indian police said Wednesday.

Police officer Vijay Singh said seven fishermen have been arrested for facilitating the American’s visit to North Sentinel Island, where the killing apparently occurred. Visits to the island are heavily restricted by the government.

The Sentinelese people live on the small forested island and are known to resist all contact with outsiders, often attacking anyone who comes near.

Foxconn Technology Group, the biggest assembler of Apple Inc. iPhones, aims to cut 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) from expenses in 2019 as it faces “a very difficult and competitive year,” according to an internal company memo.

The iPhone business will need to reduce expenses by 6 billion yuan next year and the company plans to eliminate about 10 percent of non-technical staff, according to the memo obtained by Bloomberg. The company’s spending in the past 12 months is about NT$206 billion ($6.7 billion).

Amazon.com Inc.is gearing up to challenge Apple Inc. in the mobile-payments race.

The e-commerce giant is working to persuade brick-and-mortar merchants to accept its Amazon Pay digital wallet, according to people familiar with the matter, attempting to expand a service now used primarily for purchases online.

To start, the company is looking to work with gas stations, restaurants and other merchants that aren’t direct competitors, a person familiar with the matter said. Retailers that view Amazon as a threat could resist the effort, the people said.

President Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to obtain at least $5 billion for his border wall, far more than what Senate Democrats are prepared to give. Democrats in turn are considering pushes for legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller and the elimination of a citizenship question from the next census, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

Meanwhile House Democrats are embroiled in a divisive leadership fight, limiting the energy that Nancy Pelosi can devote to the year-end spending negotiations. And House Republicans, set to enter the minority in just a month and a half, recognize this is their last chance to get a down payment for Trump’s wall before entering legislative obscurity.

The stakes have been lessened somewhat by deals this summer to fund about 75 percent of the government until next fall. But a partial shutdown isn’t what either party is looking for, either.